LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Do voters still swallow sweet election lies?

With the November 4 election looming and political parties drowning us in a fresh avalanche of promises, voters must ask the hard question: have the politicians who claimed to care actually made anything better? Do they give a damn about the man on the street, or do they just crave the raw power and fat salaries bought by our votes?

It is a national tragedy that so many voters swallow every shiny lie cooked up before an election. Time and again they are promised running water and clean streets. Yet the moment the ballots are counted, reality stays broken — or worsens — while politicians speed away in luxury vehicles.

Will voters walk into the exact same trap like tame sheep in November? Are we going to blindly watch history repeat itself, or will we finally wake up? The time for emotional voting and blind loyalty is over. Vote with cold, hard common sense. Politicians must be forcefully held accountable for the fairy tales they spin so easily.

If a party cannot prove right now that it cares about grassroots communities, it deserves total rejection at the ballot box. Let November 4 be the historic turning point where empty promises crash headfirst into a wall of informed, stubborn and fed-up voters.

Joe Kleinhans

Villieria

Fast-tracking privilege at our borders

I was surprised to observe at OR Tambo international arrivals that business class passengers and Discovery Bank clients have access to a separate fast-track channel at immigration.

There is nothing objectionable about airlines providing business class passengers with priority check-in, lounge access or baggage handling, or the Airports Company SA offering differentiated services relating to airport facilities.

But immigration control is different. It is an exercise of state authority administered by the department of home affairs. This raises a simple question: should preferential access to a government service depend on the class of airline ticket one can afford or on which private bank one uses?

If capacity exists to operate a separate immigration channel, surely it should be used to reduce waiting times for everyone, or to prioritise travellers on the basis of genuine need, such as disability or advanced age?

South Africa is already a deeply unequal society. We should be wary of allowing commercial privilege to extend into core government services.

Johan Fagan

Cape Town

Eskom’s resistance deepens SA’s energy woes

Kevin Mileham correctly argues that Eskom’s existing debt should not be a reason to further delay the establishment of an independent transmission authority (“The real cost is in delaying Eskom reform”, August 25).

But Eskom sees this as an existential threat, which is why it isn’t co-operating. What’s left of this once mighty organisation if the grid is prised from its sclerotic grip? Little other than a number of high-cost coal-fired power stations, most of which should have been closed years ago. That and a bloated bureaucracy which feeds mightily at the trough of corruption.

Load-shedding killed it. While Eskom squandered billions fixing coal fired dinosaurs, the business and residential sectors, in adopting renewables, broke a monopoly that had existed since 1923.

All the current complexities, smoke and mirrors, delaying tactics and creation of renewables subsidiaries are Eskom’s doomed attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

But if, as Mileham argues, electricity will remain expensive even under an independent grid, what’s the point of continuing? For without competitive electricity South Africa’s productive economy cannot survive and grow.

The energy revolution is already under way. Eskom has morphed from a Prometheus to a millstone for the South African economy. Its transmission infrastructure must be torn asunder, leaving the carcass to die with its debt.

James Cunningham

Camps Bay

Bitcoin’s role as loan collateral questioned

Heath Muchena purports to explain “why institutions are building credit markets around bitcoin”, but does no such thing.

He articulates how bitcoin could be used as collateral against a loan so that it did not have to be sold to access money and instead be held for its long-term growth, despite that there was a risk to such borrowing if the lender’s loan-to-value rule was breached.

But that applies to any borrowing against an asset, so my question is, “why bitcoin?”

No-one needs bitcoin for that structure since the borrower could have invested in real estate or equities (both of which are bound to be less volatile in that they offer dividends or rentals) and taken loans against that security if he wanted to be exposed to long-term growth without the extra risk of how the pledged bitcoin was secured for him.

Therefore this particular attempt to rationalise holding bitcoin fails, since the decision to hold it is a matter of faith in its value and prospects, not in its use as collateral.

Sydney Kaye

Cape Town

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